For now I’m going to assume that COVID was a “natural” pandemic and didn’t e.g. escape from a Chinese lab where it was being studied. If actually COVID was a failure of biosecurity, that would be a significant update for me.
If your epistemic state is “I’m very confident (90%+) that this was a natural pandemic” then you can make some money betting on this.
It’s not; I haven’t looked into it all and don’t have an opinion on it. I’m more flagging “this is an important bit I would want to know”, and thinking about what my opinion should be whichever way the bit comes out, and deferring to the future to figure out the value of the bit (because knowing the answer sooner doesn’t matter that much).
Tbc, when this podcast was recorded, I hadn’t encountered the hypothesis that the pandemic wasn’t natural (or perhaps I thought it wasn’t credible at the time, there was some period of time where it seemed to mostly be a conspiracy theory), or I probably wouldn’t have said anything about biosecurity.
I agree there’s a good chance the bet wouldn’t resolve. That said, you’d probably pick a trusted arbiter and a date and let that person say if they have more than 80% confidence on that date then the bet resolved to what they believe. Or something like that, there are other setups.
If your epistemic state is “I’m very confident (90%+) that this was a natural pandemic” then you can make some money betting on this.
It’s not; I haven’t looked into it all and don’t have an opinion on it. I’m more flagging “this is an important bit I would want to know”, and thinking about what my opinion should be whichever way the bit comes out, and deferring to the future to figure out the value of the bit (because knowing the answer sooner doesn’t matter that much).
Tbc, when this podcast was recorded, I hadn’t encountered the hypothesis that the pandemic wasn’t natural (or perhaps I thought it wasn’t credible at the time, there was some period of time where it seemed to mostly be a conspiracy theory), or I probably wouldn’t have said anything about biosecurity.
How would you settle the bet?
I agree there’s a good chance the bet wouldn’t resolve. That said, you’d probably pick a trusted arbiter and a date and let that person say if they have more than 80% confidence on that date then the bet resolved to what they believe. Or something like that, there are other setups.